Résultats lu par "Gordon Griffin" dans Toutes les catégories

1664. There is an electric air of foreboding on the streets of London. An atmosphere Thomas Chaloner fears will only take a small spark to ignite into another civil war.... Thomas Chaloner has forged a living as spy to the Lord Chancellor, the Earl of Clarendon, since the early days of the Restoration. Now, in February 1664, he is aware of an undercurrent of restlessness on the streets of London. The coffee houses are thick with rumours. There is anger at the new laws governing church attendance and a deepening contempt for the loucheness of the court. And there is murder.

The fourth adventure in the Thomas Chaloner series. Christopher Vine, a Treasury clerk working in solitary piety in the Painted Chamber of the Palace of Westminster, is not alone. A killer waits in the draughty hall to ensure Vine will not live to see in the New Year. And Vine is not the only government official to die that season. The Lord Chancellor fears his enemies will skew any investigation to cause him maximum damage, so he decides to commission his own inquiries into the murders.

Having just returned from a clandestine excursion to Spain and Portugal on behalf of the queen, Thomas Chaloner finds London dank and grey under leaden skies. He finds many things changed, including the government slapping a tax on printed newspapers. Handwritten news reports escape the duty, and the rivalry between the producers of the two conduits of news is the talk of the coffee houses with the battle to be first with any sort of intelligence escalating into violent rivalry. And it seems that a number of citizens who have eaten cucumbers have come to untimely deaths.

In the spring of 1666 everyone's first reaction to a sudden death at the palace of White Hall is that the plague has struck, but the killing of Thomas Chiffinch was by design, not disease. Chiffinch was holder of two influential posts - Keeper of the Closet and Keeper of the Jewels - and rival courtiers have made no secret of their wish to succeed to those offices. To Thomas Chaloner, ordered to undertake the investigation, such avarice gives a whole host of suspects an ample motive for murder.

A short story from British Library Crime Classic The Christmas Card Crime and Other Stories. A locked-room mystery that will delight Agatha Christie fans. Dramatist Trevor Lowe and his friend Detective Inspector Shadgold board the Western Express to spend Christmas in the little Cornish village of St Merryan. Heavy snowfall forces their journey to an abrupt halt and, after seeking refuge in a local pub, one of their fellow passengers is found stabbed to death, clutching half a Christmas card. Is the murderer in their midst?

When the body of hotel owner Piet Jansen is discovered amid the ruins of an archaeological site by the Nile, it looks like a routine investigation for Inspector Yusuf Khalifa of the Luxor Police. But the more he learns about Jansen, the more he is reminded of the brutal murder, some years earlier, of an Israeli woman at Karnak for which he always suspected the wrong man was convicted.

Ex-policeman turned private investigator Billy Rucker has been asked to trace Lucy Bradley, a teenage runaway on the streets of London. But when he finds her, she has been strangled and stabbed and abandoned in a disused house. Despite this being a case for the Metropolitan Police, Billy is persuaded by Lucy's father to track down her killer. And he soon finds himself embroiled in an investigation which leaves him with only one way out...

Howard Pyle's heroic version of Robin Hood begins after a conflict with some foresters leads to Robin of Locksley becoming the outlaw famous for stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. Each chapter tells a different tale of Robin as he recruits Merry Men, resists the authorities, and aids his fellow man. Pyle's version includes the popular stories of Little John and Robin's staff fight, Friar Tuck's besting of Robin, Robin's collusion with Allan-a-Dale, and several of his conflicts with the Sheriff of Nottingham.

In the seeming tranquility of Regency Square in Cheltenham live the diverse inhabitants of its 10 houses. One summer's evening the square's rivalries and allegiances are disrupted by a sudden and unusual death - an arrow to the head, shot through an open window at no. 6. Unfortunately for the murderer, an invitation to visit had just been sent by the crime writer Aldous Barnet, staying with his sister at no. 8, to his friend Superintendent Meredith.

When Carmel Hennessy begins a new job in North Yorkshire, she finds the historic city of Eborby gripped by fear. A killer is on the prowl who binds and asphyxiates his victims before leaving their naked bodies in isolated country churchyards. The press are calling him the Resurrection Man. Tragic events from the past link Carmel with DI Joe Plantagenet, who believes the case may have occult connections.

When a woman is burned to death in Grandal Field in Devon, it seems like a case of mistaken identity. Until DI Wesley Peterson learns of a legend involving a French woman who burned to death there in the 13th century. And when he discovers that records of a previous excavation on the site have vanished, and that two archaeologists involved in that dig died in tragic circumstances, Wesley starts to investigate the possibility of a link between the legend and recent events.

At the Central Criminal Court, an eager crowd awaits the trial of Victoria Lamartine, an active participant in the Resistance during the war. She is now employed at the Family Hotel in Soho, where Major Eric Thoseby has been found murdered. Thoseby is believed to have fathered Lamartine's child, and the prosecution insist that his death is revenge for his abandonment of Lamartine and her arrest by the Gestapo. A last-minute change in Lamartine's defence counsel grants solicitor Nap Rumbold just eight days to prove her innocence.

When Darren Hatman reports his daughter, Leanne, missing, DI Wesley Peterson isn't too concerned. However, Darren's claim that a photographer has been stalking her soon changes Wesley's opinion. Leanne works at Eyecliffe Castle, now converted into a luxury hotel. When Darren is found murdered on the grounds, the police fear that Leanne has met a similar fate.

A teenage girl is strangled and left for dead on a lonely country lane in Devon. The police are baffled when she describes her attacker as having the head of a dog, but when the body of a woman is found mutilated and wrapped in a sheet, DI Wesley Peterson suspects the killer may be performing an ancient ritual linked to the jackal-headed Egyptian god, Anubis. Meanwhile, archaeologist Neil Watson has been called to Varley Castle to catalogue the collection of an Edwardian amateur Egyptologist.

When Dr James Dalcott is shot dead in his cottage it looks very much like an execution. And as DI Wesley Peterson begins piecing together the victim's life, he finds that the well-liked country doctor has been harbouring strange and dramatic family secrets. Meanwhile, archaeologist Neil Watson has discovered a number of skeletons in nearby Tailors Court that bear marks of dissection and might be linked to tales of body snatching by a rogue physician in the 16th century. But when Neil finds the bones of a child buried with a 1930s coin, the investigation takes a sinister turn.

Jim Henderson is one of six guests summoned by the mysterious Edwin Carson, a collector of precious stones, to a weekend party at his country house, Thrackley. The house is gloomy and forbidding, but the party is warm and hospitable except for the presence of Jacobson, the sinister butler. The other guests are wealthy people draped in jewels; Jim cannot imagine why he belongs in such company. After a weekend of adventure with attempted robbery and a vanishing guest, secrets come to light, and Jim unravels a mystery from his past.

First published in 1911, The Innocence of Father Brown contains stories involving one of the greatest characters in the history of detective fiction: Father Brown. He is a Roman Catholic priest who has an uncanny insight into human evil. Rather than the large serial villains in, for example, Sherlock Holmes stories, the mysteries Father Brown solved were more local murders by small-town crooks, narrowing the suspect list down to those in the area of the crime.

Can love survive the worst betrayal of all? From the moment Elizabeth Nugent arrives to live on his family’s farm in Shropshire, Richard Wilde is in love with her. And as they grow up, it seems like nothing can keep them apart. But as the Second World War rages, Richard is sent to fight in the jungles of Burma, leaving Elizabeth to deal with a terrible secret that could destroy his family. Despite the distance between them, though, Richard and Elizabeth’s love remains constant through war, tragedy and betrayal.

"I had not lived in the former pit village of Lynemouth since 1961 but the winding road north from Newcastle will always be the same nostalgic highway, each twist charged with vivid memories and powerful emotions...." So begins a story full of wonderful humour, emotional candour, and hardy tales of tough times - a quietly epic family saga set amid the pit villages of the Northeast. It stretches from the 1920s, before Sid's parents had even met, to the final closing of the mine and his mother's death, in 1999.

France, 1963. Taken out of his home town as part of a nationwide “initiative”, Inspector Lucas Rocco finds himself in the village of Poissons-Les-Marais, Picardie – and answerable to his former army CO Francois Massin. On his first day he finds a murdered woman wearing a Gestapo uniform lying in a British military cemetery. When the body is removed from the mortuary before Rocco can finish his investigation, he traces the paperwork to the dead woman’s father, industrialist Philippe Bayer-Berbier.